I'm going to blame Sleeping Dogs for this streak of open world games. I just really liked that game; more than I objectively should have. In a lot of ways more than I thought I did even. But today we tackle the storied Assassin's Creed Franchise. The game series with eight entries that's been around since the ancient year of...2007. Huh. Yeah so they've really hit the Assassin's Creed hard over the past several years, going so far as to release not one but TWO games last year, one for each generation. But that's not what we're going to be talking about today. Because...well..I'm not there. I played the first Assassin's Creed a bit after its release through a GameFly rental. Not a bad game, a game with atmosphere, it was a bit underwhelming considering how hyped the series was before its launch, but still, good. AC2, on the other hand, was a bona fide hit, a great game that left people wanting more...so they gave them more...with Brotherhood....and then they gave them even more....with Revelattions..our game today.

I'm so far behind on my Assassin's Creed because, well, I only play them when I feel like it, and that's caused me to fall further and further behind. I just don't need to play that style of game all that often. It helped that ACIII by all accounts was disappointing, both in gameplay and in wrapping up the meta-story that we'd been building since the first one. This slowness has only been helpful to the series. I'm not tired of it when I get around to playing them because I play them on my time. So Revelations, a game almost universally agreed as the point the series started going downhill, actually sat pretty well with me. I still like Ezio, even though he was a bit tired out by this point, and exploring Constantinople not too long after its conquest by the Ottoman empire shoved me into a uniquely foreign world. The Ottomans are somewhat fascinating as a culture that survived all the way into the 20th century's modern world, but who have been basically forgotten as anything other than an ancient empire thanks to being overshadowed by Germany in the war that broke them up. A Muslim empire that control huge swaths of eastern europe for centuries has just kinda been forgotten by everyone, at least, in the USA.

And that, to go back to my rant as to why I liked the open world games I liked, is probably why Revelations turned out to be pretty fun for me. Being in a world I just didn't know much about and learning about it carried me pretty far. And since I hadn't played an Assassin's Creed game for about four years it was still pretty cool for me. Unless they start skipping years again I doubt I'll ever catch up to this series. But that's ok. I'll keep on playing them as I get around to it. Because they're ok games. They just aren't games worth rushing out for.

This is a Public Service Announcement for all game developers: Making me hit the bad guy a bunch of times is not difficult, it's tedious. Stop. Seriously. You're boring me.

Is it bad that this was the most memorable thing for Bound by Flame for me? It came from almost nowhere, I think I read one preview halfheartedly a few months before it came out, and then bam, it was there. But it's a game that feels like a muddled vision, a halfway between a bunch of different ideas that never had the chance to fully develop. Truly, Bound by Flame is a new experience for me, because I've played games that were unfinished before, but I've never gotten the impression from a game before that the design document was big enough to fit twelve tomes full of ideas and hopes and dreams...and then suddenly the team realized they had a month until it had to ship and just finished what they had in place already. It's a hard feeling to describe, but Bound by Flame evokes it. It doens't feel not done, a half-broken product not yet completed, it feels like everything that's in the game is completed. And yet, at the same time what's there makes me feel like they intended there to be more. The small skill trees, the half-assed romance system, the fact that there are SEVEN Lords of Frozen Shadow (protip: You don't fight all seven). It feels like the love child of Kingdoms of Amalur and Dark Souls that had some kind of birth defect. It's really weird.

There are tons of systems in place, each seemingly with grander designs than what they have. You can make traps! Exactly one kind, a mine that explodes. You have a crossbow! You have a crafting system and upgrade slots for you weapons...but only a limited pool of upgrades to choose from. You can romance two companions....assuming you don't make them leave and then you just have to do this one quest for them and bam, love. Heck, the companions system itself is perhaps the biggest example, as several people will join you but you can take only one at a time..yet sometimes the game gives you two and they both fight alongside you. You can't look at their stats or skills or upgrade them in any way, you can just give them general directions and hope that they stay alive long enough for you to kill the things so you aren't swarmed.

No guarantees though, because you're going to have to hit that two-handed sword wielding zombie about a dozen times before he dies. More if you opt for Dagger style but you should because they hit so much faster that they are clearly the superior weapon choice. The enemy durability thing really consumes this game for me and boggles my mind how anyone could praise it for its combat. Enemies aren't difficult they're just durable, and a patient man will be able to get through with few scratches or wounds, but they'll be bored to tears by the end. I know why developers do this, because difficulty is hard to do well and increasing health does indirectly make the game harder. But it's what I like to call "fake difficulty" because it's not really a test of your skills. It's difficult because no one is perfect and you're bound to mess up some percentage of the time. Increasing the health just increases the time you must fight, which increases the amount of times you could mess up, which, in turn, causes you to lose more life and possibly die. But this just doesn't feel satisfying, because you didn't get beat because you weren't good enough overcome whatever trick the enemy has, but because you couldn't overcome it 12 times in a row at a plus 90% efficiency. Ideally, once you feel like you've beaten an enemy, he should be dead. But these types of games don't give you that satisfaction, and you're forced to just repeat what you've done before until the enemy is finally slain. And that's boring. It's fine for things to be hard, but this is just dragging it out hoping for that mistake because the developer can't or won't take the time to program AI that's interesting and challenging.

People often cite Dark Souls as this awfully difficult game, because it is. You die easily, there are numerous traps and tricks in place, and death can erase hours of hard work. But as brutal as the world is, 90% of the time its fair about things (the other 10% is irredeemable bull****, but hey, nobody's perfect), and though the enemies will defend and dodge and kill you quickly...they also fall fairly fast (assuming you've been doing the work to upgrade your equipment, but it IS part RPG, after all). Bound By Flame keeps the brutality of enemy strikes, causing you to die in five or six maximum (even with armor absorbing 60% of the damage and the maximum health available), but fails to make you equally powerful. It just feels unfair and unsatisfying.

And that's probably the gripe that can cover this whole game. That it's just unsatisfying. The skill trees don't do enough (the dagger stance was more powerful than the warrior stance at the end of the game...despite having 0 points in the former and 30 in the latter), the romances feel underdeveloped, the character customization is incredibly limited, the "moral choices" without impact, and if I haven't said it enough, the combat is banal and the most unsatisfying of all.

There were times I was having fun playing Bound by Flames, so it's not completely without merit. The style is fairly original, the never ending snark occasionally funny, the plotline unique. But nothing is well-developed enough to overcome the fact that I was just bored most of the time I was playing it. It can be finished in under 15 hours with relative ease and almost total if not total completion. It could be replayed while selecting the opposite moral choices, but this makes next to no difference, only which companion will leave you at the end of Act 2, and that's only from the one choice. Sure, it'll change your appearance and give bonuses on one route, but you're still playing through the same levels with the same combat options. It's just not worth it. But then, it's not worth it to play it through the first time. Skip it.

This is probably the worst game I've played this year that's a real game. I mean, Proteus isn't a real game, so that doesn't count. The only thing in contention is X-Men Destiny, but while that was pathetic and kinda boring, this is tedious and equally as boring. More effort went into this, but it's still probably worse. Ugh. I'm going back to play something I know I'll love.

I said before I have few games I start but do not finish, yet in the 20 weeks of 52 in 52 so far, this is the FIFTH game that bears that distinction. That's 25%! I didn't mention it, but I rented Arkham Origins once before I finished it in my second rental. Then there's Dark Souls, Diablo III, Radiant Dawn, and Now Dragon's Crown. Like Radiant Dawn, Dragon's Crown was another victim of the move, but unlike Radiant Dawn, Dragon's Crown was not a huge disappointment.

Despite last week's tease, I played a Warrior primarily, though I had a sorceress that I played with a little, it was the Warrior that I completed the game with. I think IGN overhyped this one a little bit, because while it was pretty fun, it was not the great RPG that they made it out to be. Dragon's Crown is ultimately just the next stage in the beat-em-up. The old genre that was kickstarted by Double Dragon and that I played a ton of in the early 90s as part of various licensed cabinets. X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, these were the most exciting things to see in an arcade (especially the one time I saw the full eight player X-Men cabinet). Of course, the genre isn't designed to be good so much as its designed to eat quarters, and as such the death of arcades has signaled the death of the genre for the most part, with a few holdovers still occasionally showing up.

The successful entrants into the Genre shift the focus a little bit and DID add RPG elements to vary things up. It was a move some games dabbled in in height of the beat 'em up genre in the 90s, most notably the Capcom produced Dungeons and Dragons titles that I loved so much despite having so limited access to them. This does the same. It gives you several classes to play through the game with, each possessing their own unique skills, abilities, and playstyles. I only played with two, the Warrior and Sorceress, but they really did feel different. The Warrior was less complicated but more my style of rushing the enemy and really getting in there, so he's the one I went with. Maybe that was a mistake though, because it made the gameplay rather uninvolved in the end.

I was also rather annoyed at how focused the game was at being a four player game. While you don't HAVE to play online obviously, you still find AI companions scattered through out and once you revive them, they'll automatically join into the mission part way through at will and at random. You can turn this off, but the game WANTS to be four player and is balanced around that concept. The hordes of monsters just become overwhelmingly annoying alone, and certain abilities, like the aforementioned Warrior's, are based around the idea of supporting teammates. And while I'd have no problem playing the game with my buddies, they weren't around when I was playing the game and it's not really their style anyway.

The art is simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. It's ultra stylized and exaggerated, with tremendous amounts of detail put into every bit. You can't help but admire it...and at the same time be kind of off-put by it. Unsurprisingly perhaps because of what I said about Lollipop Chainsaw, I am unbothered by the blatant sexualization of the Sorceress and the Amazon. Ignoring the essays out there talking about how the Sorceresses design is intentional to represent fertility and all that jazz, because while they may be true I suspect she's designed to be pretty to look at as well as all that jazz. But attacking this game for one or two of its characters while ignoring the rest just seems odd to me. The entire lot of them are strange exaggerations of human design. The two most normal are the Wizard and Archer, who even then represent the pretty boy and the loli, The Warrior is as top heavy as the Sorceress, and the Dwarf is more of a muscled monstrosity than the Amazon is even. These are all weird weird looking people, grossly exaggerated in all facets. Did they hyper-sexualize the Sorceress and to a lesser extent the Amazon? Sure, but in context, it's not inherently a bad decision. It's just a decision.

Ultimately, Dragon's Crown is solid fun, but the art is really what makes it special. The art pieces that are unlocked in missions are gorgeous and lack the grotesque context that the in-game art features along with its beauty. And I shouldnt' overstate the grotesque elements. When you watch the game in motion it's just beautiful. It's only when you just stare at it and study it that it looks kinda...weird along with its beauty. As long as you don't mind a little repetitivness, play it, it's fun enough, has variety in playstyles, and is worth it just ot watch it in motion.

But I think I'll take my beautifully artistic games in a complete opposite direction next just for context.

The Uncharted Series the most overrated of the previous generation. It follows its predecessor of the previous generation Grand Theft Auto, which narrowly beat out God of War (and some days loses depending on my mood at the time, and eagerly awaits a game from this next generation to draw my ire away from it.

But before you flame me you should understand that the most overrated series of a generation is not necessarily a bad game. I like God of War and I like Uncharted (I am in the distinct minority that does not care for GTA, however). But they're 8/10 games at best being treated like 9.5/10 games at worst. And that's just nonsense. Why do I hold them in such disdain? Becuase they're shooters with bad shooting. And that's kinda dumb.

Now, to be clear, it's obvious from what they've done with Uncharted that Uncharted is a shooter because shooters were and are popular when the game series was made. Were in made in the 80s or early 90s for consoles it'd be an action platformer, and if it was made for the PC it'd be a point-and-click adventure. It doesn't matter, because the gameplay portion of the game is clearly second to the Indiana Jones shtick. But second or not it's still there and I still have to play it to get to the part we all agree is excellent. And bad shooting in a shooter is not something you should take lightly.

It's a bad shooter for two basic reasons. The aiming doesn't allow for precision because of it's constant speed of motion for right stick movement (i.e., a slight push on the stick moves at the same speed as a full press of the stick, while most modern shooters move slower on a slight push to allow for slight adjustments), and the enemies are bullet sponges. The bullet sponge thing always annoyed me because of its immersion breaking properties. Not something I normally am willing to recognize as legitimate, but this is one of those odd cases where they've made the immersion breaking choice for a bad gameplay mechanic. So, fair game. Simply put, that guy in a Hawaiian shirt should not be able to take three to the chest and get back up. When Halo makes me pump a clip into the Elites, it makes sense, because they're alien monstrocities that are bred for war. But even Halo gives me grunts to pop a couple of bullets in and watch their buddies run in terror from. Dudes in Hawaiian shirts should fall to one in the knee and die from blood loss, let alone two to the chest. It's not simply a matter of me being annoyed cause its hard (partially because it's not really hard), it's a matter of it slowing the game down and bogging the battles down with annoyances. If you made every enemy die in a single bullet but tripled them, it'd take the same amount of time but it'd be three times as fun. Because I'd be wasting three times as many enemies, and that's badass. Instead I have to just pump them full of lead and hope they stay down. And while it makes sense for the heavily armored dudes to take a while, again, Hawaiian shirts. Hence, "The Uncharted Problem"

I'm really not sure what's more frustrating about Uncharted's bad shooting. The fact that its bad shooting because of intentional design decisions or the fact that the bad shooting is exacerbated by their other decisions. Like the fact that shooting them in the mouth doesn't count as a head shot. Or sometimes the eyes. Or the fact that while it holds to two weapon design, it mandates that one of those two weapons be a hand gun. Which for story purposes makes sense...but just becomes incredibly annoying when I have a machine gun and come across a shot gun. Gotta keep that pistol that is far less powerful and shoots slower than either of the other options. Seriously, if you're going to mandate he holds a pistol, fine. But make it so having to hold that pistol doesn't feel like a handicap. Like I want to use that pistol and only feel like I need the rifle type for special situations.

And I've gone 700 words without referencing this specific Uncharted. Because, in the end, this is exactly what you're expecting from an Uncharted game. The shooting still sucks, the adventure is still wildly entertaining. The writing is, admittedly, not as strong as it is in the other titles, but it's still a fun adventure that fits in with Drake's Adventures. And unlike Uncharted 3, it doesn't feel like a retread of a story Uncharted has already covered. The most unfortunate thing about Golden Abyss is that you have to have a Vita to play it, but I would remind you that if you had a Vita you could play the best version of Persona 4 which is a 10/10 game and therefore worth buying a Vita for. Even though you could play it again on PS2. Because Persona 4 is that good. But I digress. If you have a Vita, this is on PS Plus, which means its free, which means you should download it. It'll entertain you for ten hours, and that's a pretty great thing for a game to do.

Sometimes, when I see a new Tales game has been announced, all I can do is look at Square and make exasperated gestures at them. Why can you produce Final Fantasies at the rate Bamco trots out Tales games for every system imaginable. PSP? Check. Wii? Check. Xbox 360? Check. PS3? Of course. Though strangely enough, while not the first Tales game released on the system, it is the first one designed for it in the first place, with both Vesperia and Graces being originally made up for the 360 and Wii respectively.

And it's not like the games are subpar quality. Certainly, they don't make as many dramatic changes as FF games tend to, sticking to a battle system that is 70-80% the same from game to game, but what they put out are solid quality RPGs that take a long time and are fun to play. Tales of Xillia is no different in this aspect. It's a 40ish hour RPG with the trademark real-time tales battle system. It's fun, the characters are largely likable and distinct, and....

Why do I have so little enthusiasm for it?

Honestly, as I write this I continue to think of problems I had with the game, both big and small, but it's not a game I hate, it's not even a game I dislike. It's good, it's just...I dunno. There's just something about most Tales games that leaves me unsatisfied for one reason or another. Not all of them, mind you. The first I played, Tales of Destiny, I really dug for a lot of reasons, even if you probably have to be a certain age for talking swords to seem cool and not dumb. Tales of Symphonia was a great game that I felt completely satisfied with. And then Tales of the Abyss really nailed it, being one of my favorite RPGs of all.

But at this point there are far more I feel varying degrees of meh towards than genuine love towards. Eternia (Destiny II in the states), Legendia, Vesperia, Graces, Xilllia, I can't say I like them all the same, because I don't, but I just don't FEEL anything towards them. Graces comes the closest, but it just a bit too predictable. And I don't know why. I would recommend every single one of them to an RPG fan. And yet, they don't affix themselves to my brain the way something like Final Fantasy does. Or even the other Tales games I mention.

Racking my brain for reasons, I do keep coming back to the question of "why?", in that so many of the games have a serious "why?" problem. What is a "why?" problem? It's a situation where if you ask the question why the whole thing falls apart. You could call it a plot hole but that's broad and not descriptive. All "why?" problems are plot holes, but not all plot holes are "why?" problems. And Xillia is as big of a perpetrator as any. The plot isn't horrible or anything, but there are several points in the story when attempting to justify the character's actions isn't really possible. You roll with it because that location marker is on your map so you might as well go to it, but still.

Maybe it's that they're too easy, because in general they are. Xillia was brain dead simple, and though they give you plenty of ways to slaughter the enemy, I spent 90% of the game just plowing through the resistance like...a plow through dirt....>_> Or something. Only right at the end did anything offer any real resistance, and even then I never really felt in danger. I didn't even bother assigning the healing spells to the right stick like I usually do for quick access. The real time system, though it keeps you occupied, also probably leads to this situation. And to be honest I was never that big of a fan of it. Sure, it was neat in 1997 when I first played Tales of Destiny and every other RPG was turn based to some degree, but at this point real-time systems dominate the production and I'm just not as into it as I am turn systems. Perhaps it's just because I was always uncoordinated and so was picked last in sports but could beat anybody in chess. Real-time vs. Turn based.

I dunno. I could talk about Xillia for a while, but not without going into story detail which I don't want to do. Heck, the whole reason I started playing Xillia was because my friend beat it and wanted someone to talk to about it. Again, I recommend it, it's good, RPG fans should get it....but my heart's just not in it.